Portable electronic devices such as audio recorders, digital cameras, and video cameras, are becoming increasingly popular. As a result, an ever-increasing amount and variety of multimedia data, such as pictures, recordings, documents, and emails are becoming available. Traditionally, multimedia data is organized and stored by data type, such as photographs in a photo album, music in an audio player memory, and video on a digital video disk (DVD). However, organizing, storing and sharing multimedia data electronically can be cumbersome and confusing, especially to inexperienced computer users. Hence, there is a need for an improved system and method to display a multimedia timeline.